Fujitsu Technology Solutions Pumps Up PrimePower Line

Fujitsu Technology Solutions Wednesday introduced the latest additions to its PrimePower line. During the next several months the PrimePower900, the PrimePower1500, and the PrimePower2500 will join the PrimePower650 and PrimePower850 as members of FTS' flagship family.
Fujitsu Technology Solutions Wednesday introduced the latest additions to its PrimePower line. During the next several months the PrimePower900, the PrimePower1500, and the PrimePower2500 will join the PrimePower650 and PrimePower850 as members of FTS' flagship family.

The three new servers will have faster processing speeds due to a 1.3 GHz processor SPARC64 V processor for the PrimePower900, the PrimePower1500, and the PrimePower2500. The founding family members will also get a boost in processing power: A 1.08 GHz processor will be available for the PrimePower1500 and the PrimePower2500. The PrimePower900 will also be available with a 1.08 GHz processor.

Other new features include flexible partitioning; a multipath, high-performance crossbar; PCI support; and a 50 percent smaller footprint. Like all of FTS' offerings, the new PrimePower servers run on the Solaris operating system.

The PrimePower900 contains up to 16 CPUs, the PrimePower1500 contains up to 32 CPUs, and the PrimePower2500, which will be considered the flagship of the PrimePower line, contains up to 128 CPUS and 320 PCI connections.

The SPARC64 V processor itself offers a host of enhancements, including six simultaneous execution units and four simultaneous floating-point operations. It has 2 MB of on-chip second-layer cache and non-blocking cache.

With a data transfer rate of 533 MHz and a sustained bandwidth of 133 GB/s, the new systems offer the fastest backplane speed of server any on the market, Tom Donnelly, PrimePower senior product manager told ServerWatch. It does this through a fabric-switched crossbar. Unlike a point-to-multipoint backplane, which FTS has used in previous systems and is the industry standard, the fabric-switched crossbar is fully redundant, providing ECC protection across all data paths and a dual clock. The backplane also has automatic load balancing to redirect traffic to less busy areas and has no single point of failure.

Another key feature that the new architecture offers is "RAS on a chip," a capability more typically found on mainframes,according to Donnelley. He explained that rather than executing an instruction 17 times before moving to the CPU level to check for a problem (as is typical in the Solaris operating system), when an instruction fails, the processor will immediately retry the instruction at the hardware level. It does not need to flush and then rebuild the software buffers before re-executing the failed instruction.

Extended partitioning capabilities enable the servers to accommodate 950 different partitioning options that are changeable on the fly. Partitioning can be done on the CPU level and contain as few as two CPUs. The PrimePower650 and PrimePower850, which contain eight and 16 CPUs, respectively, cannot be partitioned.

The PrimePower650 and PrimePower850 with 810 MHz processors are available now. They will ship with the 1.08 MHz processor beginning in the first quarter of 2003, Donnelly said. The PrimePower1500 will be available with an 810 MHz processor in December. The PrimePower900, the PrimePower1500, and the PrimePower2500 will be available with the 1.3 GHz processor starting next March.